(1) Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a carrier selection method for logistics network, and especially relates to a carrier selection method for logistics network with an maximal network reliability.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
With the growth of the globalization, many global enterprises expend their market areas in the world and execute the outsourcing of the logistics activities to external carriers. Therefore, a carrier plays an important role in the global logistics and has influence on the cost, the profit, and the service level in supply chain. The conventional carrier selection methods are based on total cost or total profit criterion, and the carrier's capacity such as the numbers of the containers in the convention is set to be deterministic.
However, the capacity provided by the carrier is stochastic since the capacity may be partially reserved by other orders. In other words, any carrier should have multiple available capacities with a probability distribution. Especially, the logistics network includes the land routes, the ocean routes and the air routes, so the capacities of the carriers corresponding to several routs are different. In other words, when the freight travels through several routs, the corresponding consumption of the capacity is different. A carrier selection or a carrier set, is called, means that the enterprise selects exact one carrier on each of the routes to implement the freight delivery, and the logistics network according to the carrier selection is called as a stochastic logistic network (SLN). The network reliability is a performance index of the freight delivery and is defined as the probability that the specific demand of the commodity are successfully transported from a supplier to a customer.
Hence, how to select one carrier set with the maximal network reliability to provide the stabilization of the freight delivery, to obtain the reliability of the commodity transport, to decrease the costs and to increase the earnings is an important issue.